


The choices you make affect the destiny of the universe you cre8te

by trickstersGambit



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Gen, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, RP drabble, use of canon material
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-01-04
Packaged: 2017-11-23 15:10:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trickstersGambit/pseuds/trickstersGambit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their prize for winning, for their success, was a nearly empty world, and a lack of memory of the events that caused it. Three years after reawakening, John slowly began remembering it all, and feeling regret for it all; Especially for words gone unsaid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The choices you make affect the destiny of the universe you cre8te

**Author's Note:**

> Proof that I'm alive and writing! Just not always for 'Will you be Striders?'. This drabble comes from one of my John RP blogs: [windyHoodlum](http://windyhoodlum.tumblr.com).

There are no bird songs in your world; You could probably correct that to ‘there are no bird songs that i can hear’ but you’re pretty certain you’re correct. You can’t hear it when you sit on your balcony, or when you bike the long path into the city, on the rare occasions that you do.

You begin to suspect that there isn’t a single animal in the world. The doe you saw months ago may well have been a desperate figment of your imagination. You don’t know why you think about these things as you push yourself down this path, but you do. Your mind goes round about the presence of animals, or birds, or people.

The signs are there: Painted roads that are slowly being churned by roots of trees. Houses with bird feeders tucked against their fences, buildings long dark without their people to brighten and cheer their interiors.

It’s early and really too cold for any normal person to be out; If you were normal, you’d probably be at home too, but the cold isn’t going to kill you. It’s been years since you woke up to an empty world with no memory of the game or your friends. Years since and you’ve stayed carefully within the confines of your own home, avoiding leaving in the event that someone should come back.

That wasn’t going to do for the rest of your life. It was time to make a change.

You were going to start by changing the walls of your little house; Paint them in the colors of your friends words, warm and cool alike. You were going to make your house your HOME once more.

The people you loved might be gone, they might leave and come back and leave again, but you could keep pieces of them with you.

To do that, you’re pushing yourself and your little wagon train to the city. The clatter of red flyer wheels on uneven pavement and snow fills the air for a long time, accompanying the music you have playing from the cosby-head gear you made in the game.

You can see the city looming at the end of the path as you pull through, and you pause, sighing. Your goal is a large paint shop near the bay. You saw it once when your dad took you to the aquarium. It’s still hours away, then it’s several hours back. All this for paint.

All this because you couldn’t find the colors you wanted at the shop in your town, or the next one over.

It’s not the first time you’ve pushed yourself there before. You biked to Seattle with Dave once. That was with a burger for a goal though…

You shake that out of your head and push yourself forward again, starting back on the path, eyeing the projected map in your cosbyset’s overlay. You’ll get there. You’ll get there and you’ll fill your flyer and tomorrow?

Tomorrow you’re going to paint your house.

Hours pass, wordless, melodic piano music fills your ears as you pump your legs. The smell of the Vancouver-Seattle bay fills your nostrils and you breath deep, shuddering at the chill that fills your lungs. You don’t like the cold, but you LOVE your area. You love Washington. You can’t imagine living anywhere else.

You pull to a stop in front of the store and throw the kickstand. It’s huge alright. Not as big as you thought it was but big enough. If you’re lucky, the paint will still be good—

The door is locked when you try it, and you sigh. You don’t like the idea of breaking anything. It’s YOUR world. You should, logically, feel better about it, but someone owned this once. Someone with a house, and bills…

You pick out the basic sledge hammer and smash in the glass on the door, then push your arm through to grab for the lock. A flick of the wrist opens it, and you’re in.

The store smells strongly of paint, paint thinner and dust. It looks as though people just walked off the job in the middle of work, abandoning everything they had to just…

decay.

It’s creepy. You never find bodies, just the signs that people used to be here. Lunches set out for children by loving parents. Cars parked on roads. Half open registers.

You step through the building, red flyer in hand, rubbing dust off name plates and color guides, one by one adding buckets of paint to the load.

You get to a dim grey that could easily pass for the echoes of shouting, capslock’d words that filled your pester screen and laugh a little bitterly.

“your name was karkat… you called yourself my god.” You touch the color on the paper beside the bucket. “you said we were friends. i threw a bucket in your face. you were the least patient person in existence but i liked you a lot…”

You look back at the other cans. 

A pair of orange Striders, a pink, and purple Lalonde, a bright green Harley and a dark green English, cyan for Nana—who was also Jane. You have Dave with you, sort of, but you’ve still pulled a bright red for him.

A sigh pushes out of your lungs and you move the grey to the cart with the others, then go back to trudging through the store. There are still more colors you haven’t found. Colors associated with your beloved friends. 

Hours pass. You’re tired. You’ve carefully picked, and checked, ten more paint buckets, but the final color eludes you.

A color associated with your hammer, with a set of clothes and a pair of dice. A magic eight ball and a quirk filled with references to the same supposedly lucky number.

The color associated with the person who came to be one of your greatest allies, and closest friends, on the other team. You found her peanut butter brown boyfriend, but her…

Your eyes go to a tag card of blue. There, at the top, is the perfect shade—and it’s bucket companion sits perched atop the highest shelf on the wall. The ladder’s wheels screech and defy you when you try to move it, and no amount of kicking or hitting unjams the rusty wheel lock.

Hope seems lost, and you perch on the floor, staring up at the coveted can, hugging your knees. 

She poured her heart out to you. Asked you for forgiveness when it wasn’t yours to give. In a way, you loved her, which makes this moment sting and ache. She’s someone you want to represent so desperately, but she’s so far away…

Wind stirs the dust around you, shoving at your back, whispering in your ears. You almost swear you can hear ‘you can do it, son’, and you grab hold of the sensation. The wind twists under your command and for a moment you’re in the air, the can INCHES from your fingers. You grab for it, pull and— the wind falls from under you. As quickly as your grasp on the fickle current began, it’s gone and you go tumbling to the ground, body wrapped around the can to prevent it from being damaged or spilled. 

When you recover, you find that your special paint is safe. 

You set it in front of you and grab up a tool to pry up the lid.

Blue green text swirls in your mind as the paint swirls on the stick in your hand.

AG: John, I am clearly involved in your rise to power now regardless. That can’t 8e changed!  
AG: I am giving you the option, 8ecause at some point a hero has to start making choices.  
AG: Once you take a 8r8k from hunting treasure and stop getting distracted 8y side quests, you eventually realize that’s what this game is all a8out.  
AG: The choices you make affect the destiny of the universe you cre8te, as well as the type of hero you 8ecome. 

You remember her words plainly. They swim and swirl, and you can almost see her face. 

AG: 8ut see, you really get it. That’s why you’re special.

Your heart aches as you lift the stirring stick up and watch the deep color dribble off.

AG: What if I’m not as lucky as I thought?  
AG: What if I do not in fact have ALLLLLLLL of the luck?  
EB: well, maybe you don’t?  
EB: all of the luck sounds like an awful lot of luck to have.  
AG: Exactly! 

You only knew her a while, but the troll with the blue text was an emense part of your life. You can almost remember some parts, barely remember others. Her comment about luck though. It stands out the most.

AG: 8ut I think what’s motiv8ting me to win this fight the most is……..  
AG: The possi8ility of getting to meet you when it’s all over! 

Did you ever get to meet her? You don’t remember. You know her face, you think. You remember everything she said to you. But you don’t remember if you met her face to face and god…

You could really use Serket right now. You could talk to her about the anxiety, and the loneliness. It doesn’t seem right to talk to Dave about it, now that he’s taken, but Vriska was like… That pink quadrant you remember Karkat talking about once… The diamond…

“I’m sorry Vriska.” You brush the stirring stick off and pound the lid back on.

Of all the people you can’t really remember, you think you miss Vriska Serket the most. She was like your female best friend. Where you loved dave… ‘that way’… you loved her in an entirely different one. It baffled you when you read something about a date from her…

You shove yourself up and take the handle of the can, carrying it to your flyer, tucking it in with the other nineteen. They’re all relatively small cans, so there’s room for other things in there. Your trip home has other stops that bring fresh blankets, pillows, a clothes line, a few pairs of shoes.

You stuff the flyer, the basket, your sylladex. Weigh yourself down and push yourself harder than you’ve ever pushed yourself before. You pedal out the memories of dead or possibly dead friends, let yourself cry where no one can see you.

Somehow, even with Dave, and Charles in your life, you’re lonelier than before. Rounding the road to your house in the dark that night, with your dumb, pedal powered lights brings all that into sharp relief. 

Your house is empty. Your house has been empty.

Tomorrow, providing you can move, you’re going to fill it with color to mimic the voices of your friends.

The cool sarcastic needles of Rose Lalonde, and drunken typos of her mother. The bubbly spring greens of Jade and her grandpa, the warm orange and reds of the Striders, and all the trolls who’s colors you had to guess, or you knew from vague memories or more recent conversations on pesterchum with alternates of theirs.

It’s a trial, unhooking the flyer again. Your fingers are chilled icy from the long ride in the dark, and you slip a couple of times, slice open your palm on the sloppy, home made rig, but you manage it with a small amount of cursing.

You even manage, with legs of jelly, to pull your wagon into the house, up the single step that makes up the porch.

It slides in easily under the grand piano that was your single christmas gift, the door going shut on the heel of your shoe.

You’re home. Finally.

A few minutes to clean and wrap your hand and you slump onto the couch, curling on your side, humming to yourself.

You’re home, alright. Home to an empty house filled with whispering ghosts and memories from an event you don’t know if you want to remember or forget.

Whether you know or not, you’re making an active choice: you’re choosing to remember. For better or worse, you’re going to remember.


End file.
